A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. These readings are all in sequence. So, like, once again, I would recommend that in a few moments of leisure, you go back and read this text in its entirety. Because breaking it up this way is certainly going to ruin anything. Can you imagine reading Shakespeare this way?
A little bit every day, you know. So anyway, our lord said to his disciples, I am the true vine, and my father is the vine grower, the vineyard keeper. He prunes away every barren branch, but the fruitful branches he trims, he makes them clean to increase their yield. You are clean already, thanks to the word that I have spoken to you. Live on in me as I do in you.
No more than a branch can bear fruit of itself apart from the vine. Can you bear fruit apart from me? I am the vine. You are the branches. He who lives in me and I live in him will produce abundantly.
For apart from me, you can do nothing. A man who does not live in me is like a withered, a rejected branch, picked up to be thrown into the fire to be burned. If you live in me and my words stay heart of you, you may ask what you will. It will be done for you. My father has been glorified in your bearing much fruit and becoming my disciples.
And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. It is, of course, one of the texts which creates enormous difficulties.
One of those difficulties, Saint Augustine had to face, this is three fifty four to 04/30, with what is called Pelagianism. Now Pelagius was a very sincere, honest Christian with a tremendous conviction about man's personal responsibility that you are autonomous and that you have to bear the guilt for what you do. If you don't if you don't, how can you call it your own? And he emphasized this human element of autonomy and responsibility or free will, if you want to call it that, To such an extent that grace and God's power and God's activity were practically eliminated. That the grace of God simply was sort of an opportunity to encourage us to act.
Well, Saint Augustine, being the good man and the good Catholic he was, couldn't swallow that. Because what do you do when you have a text like this from Saint John? When our Lord says, and he not only says it, but he keeps hammering it in, that without me, you can do nothing. So once again, we have this perennial problem of how much of my life is attributed to God, how much is attributed to me as the efficient cause. Well, it's a big And then, how do you put the two together?
Now, I've told this little story many times, but I never get tired of telling it. You may get tired of hearing it, but that's the advantage of being up here. But it because it brings out so clearly what we have to, in fact, however you deal with this academically and theoretically, you've got to come down to hard facts. And the hard facts are that I have to save myself and God saves me. That's that's what we have to admit in faith.
Now how you put the two together, that's another question. The story is this, a minister and his wife for after the services of Sunday are driving out in the country on a very beautiful, tranquil, warm, sunny June Sunday afternoon, and they come to this beautifully kept farm. The fences are all whitewashed and gleaming in the sun. The the ditches are all cleaned, you know, all been been cleared. The fields are immaculate.
Well, they're manicured is the word we use. The the buildings are all nicely painted and they're not leaning over, they're in great they're permanent, sturdy, nicely adorned with a little bit of red over the white, the farmhouse under the trees, you know, it's a bucolic scene. And they see a man leaning on the fence. So they stopped the car and the minister goes over and he he says, is this your farm? And the man says, yes, it is.
Well, then the minister begins to express his appreciation for this beautiful beautiful scene, and then he he goes on speaking to the farmer to praise God's goodness. You know, the third chapter of Daniel, How good God is to us to give us all of these wonderful gifts and, you know, on and on. And all of it's true. It's true. And then farmers leans on the fence and he listens very very politely.
And when it's all finished, he looks up at the minister and says, well, he said, I agree with everything you've said, but you should have seen this place when God had it alone. There it is. There it is. You see, there's a very basic philosophical principle that I adhere to completely, that there is nothing I can do without gods doing it. We call that contingency.
I am a contingent being. And at the same time, even in my act of free will, I have to bring God's efficient causality into it. I believe that profoundly. You will hear people saying there's a book that that became extremely popular, that God isn't responsible for physical evil, man creates it. That's a lot of nonsense.
Nonsense. Because if man is a contingent being, that means that in everything he is and has and wants and everything else, he depends upon God or the absolute or any words you want to use. Now, this is at once a consoling thought, and at the same time, it's a very sobering thought. Very. Very.
But the Christian has to put the two together. He has to be see that farm as the farmer's thought. You should have seen this place when God had it alone. There's another story I'm very fond of, and this is a true one, that after the first world war, a church was destroyed over in Belgium, and it was really demolished. Well, after the war, one of the first things the Americans did was to help the villagers to restore their church.
And they did. They were very successful in putting it back together again. And in the ruins they found a statue, and they found all the parts of the statue except the hands. It was a statue of our Lord, and they couldn't find the hands. So they put the statue up, they restored it as best they could without the hands, and then on the day of the rededication of the church, someone put a little inscription under that picture of Christ I mean, the statue of Christ without his hands, and the little inscription read, I have no other hands than yours.
Do you see the point? God needs us. Saint Paul said this, that we are the instruments of God. There's work to be done that and as Newman has put it out, that unless I do it, it'll never be done. You should have seen this place when God had it alone.
If that farmer, and I'm sure his wife and his kids, if they hadn't been laboring hard on that place, it wouldn't have looked that beautiful expanse of farmland that the minister and his wife admired. And yet our lord says, without me, you can do nothing. But if you abide in Christ, you can do everything. Now there is the consoling part of this. You see, too often we feel so isolated, we feel so alone.
If you can believe a psychiatrist today, this is the greatest weakness, the greatest mental illness, whatever word you want to use, that people are afflicted with today. They feel they feel so isolated, so imprisoned or enslaved in their solitude, and then we hear so much about community and reaching out to others, you know, we're fed up with this kind of nonsense. I don't say it's nonsense, but you see it is nonsense if we overlook two important facts, And that this is, first of all, that a human being is autonomous, and as our holy father says, irreplaceable. And that the only reality to community and to society is the individual human being who stands alone before God with his own responsibility, with his own responsibility. I am the vine, you are the branches.
And so we stand there before God, and our blessed Lord has said, with me, you can do everything. Without me, you can do nothing. Don't join the multitude to prove Christ wrong. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.